


Luminous Beings and Crude Matter

by devilinthedetails



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: AU, Evil Author Day, Gen, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-17 08:22:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29468664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: An AU ST rewrite in which Rey and Kylo are reincarnated versions of Obi-Wan and Anakin because Anakin still has work to do to defeat Sidious and bring balance to the Force.
Kudos: 3





	1. In the Netherworld Before Birth or Rebirth (Prologue)

**Author's Note:**

> This story is being written for Evil Author's Day because while I envision it as being epic in scope, I have only vague plans for where I want it to go after the first few chapters. I do hope to make further progress on it and perhaps even finish it, but I make no firm commitments or promises, hence why this fic is being classified as an Evil Author fic. I thank any readers out there willing to take a chance on this fic because I know it is something of a bizarre idea with what may be very niche appeal, but my muse has been wanting to write something like this for awhile, so it is nice to gratify the muse with finally publishing a little bit of this story that has been pinballing around in my head for quite awhile.

In the Netherworld Before Birth or Rebirth (Prologue)

In the netherworld of the Force where only pure spirits dwelled after death and before birth (or rebirth), there was a disturbance in what should have been the eternal tranquility of the place. A wave that seemed to promise to produce a tsunami that could drown the whole galaxy.

Palpatine--Sidious--had returned to the universe. Anakin wasn’t sure how the slimy old villain had done it. Perhaps some trick of the Dark Side that he had never taught Anakin, so method of defying death that he hadn’t shared with Anakin despite swearing that he would show Anakin the power to save Padme when he tempted Anakin to the Dark Side like a moth to the flame that killed it. That would’ve been a deception fitting of the Dark Side. A cruelty worthy of the Sith, who were never kind to anyone, least of all the students they expected to inevitably turn upon them. The Dark Side was a path to great power but also to great, unending loneliness. A loneliness deep and dark as the Death Star chasm Anakin had hurled his Sith Master down, thinking to destroy him.

But Sidious hadn’t been destroyed. He was back as a black presence in the galaxy. That was all Anakin knew, all he was certain of, because he had once been bound to Sidious as Sith apprentice and Master. That imparted a dark knowledge, an ability to vaguely sense where the other was and what evil the other was doing. It was a mirror black and heavy as the mask he had once been forced to wear to survive, to breathe, as Darth Vader.

“He’s back,” Anakin insisted to Obi-Wan, wishing his stubborn friend would believe him, would trust him on this, because he was an authority on the Dark Side having been in its thrall for two long decades of his life. “Sidious is back. I can feel it.”

“How can you know that?” Obi-Wan frowned at him, rippling the Force that had always connected and separated them.

“Because I was a slave to the Dark Side for many years.” Anakin’s words were weighted with guilt and grief. A guilt and grief for which even his death to save his son couldn’t atone. “Because I was immersed in it so deeply that it etched an eternal, unwashable black mark on my soul. Because I was submerged in it until I drowned in it and reveled in the drowning. I know the Dark Side, and it knows me intimately.”

“How can he be back?” Obi-Wan arched an eyebrow. Or his spirit did at any rate. The netherworld of the Force was a confusing mishmash of the spiritual and the physical that was immensely confusing to Anakin even if he lived within it. “You threw him down a massive pit to the Death Star reactor, and the Death Star blew up. How could he have survived that?”

“I don’t know,” Anakin retorted. He wished that becoming one with the Force after his death had made him all-knowing. It hadn’t. “Same way Maul survived being cut in half by you and falling down a large chasm on Naboo. Some Dark Side technique Sidious guarded jealously from me that I never learned.”

“Then someone else will have to kill Sidious. Again.” Obi-Wan sounded too serene and detached for Anakin’s taste. As if it wasn’t Anakin’s decreed fate to destroy the Sith and Sidious. As if anyone else could do it.

“No.” Anakin shook his head, irritated by Obi-Wan’s obtuseness. “I’m the Chosen One prophesied to destroy the Sith, which means destroying Sidious. I have to do it because nobody else can. I must fulfill my destiny?”

“How?” Obi-Wan pressed, spreading empty hands. “Sidious is a physical creature residing in the physical plane of the galaxy, is he not?”

“Yes.” Anakin could sense that much. Sidious was now a being of wrinkled, rotting flesh who had preserved his body in this perverse form at the expense of his corrupted spirit. An abomination sustained only by strange medical devices even more terrible than Darth Vader. Where the Jedi focused on the transcendent soul, the Sith fixated on mummifying fetid flesh in barely living body because the Sith represented the ultimate twisting of life for selfish purposes. “That’s why I’ll have to find a way for my soul to reborn into another body so I can battle and defeat Sidious in the physical realm.”

“No soul has ever been reborn in such a fashion.” Obi-Wan stared at him the way skeptics must have gaped at the first brave being to suggest that sentients might travel between stars at speeds faster than light. “It’s impossible.”

“With the Force, nothing is impossible.” It felt unnatural for Anakin to have to be the one to remind his mentor of this core Jedi truth. “The Force willed me into existence once to fulfill a prophecy. It might again if I ask it to and explain how it is necessary to truly fulfill that same prophecy.”

“The Force isn’t your servant, Anakin,” Obi-Wan responded with his own sharp reminder. “It’s nobody’s servant.”

“Yes, I know. We’re all servants of the Force.” Anakin rolled his eyes as he recited this ancient Jedi platitude. “That’s why I must serve the Force with my rebirth.”

“This is the first time anything like this has been attempted.” Obi-Wan pinched his forehead, a gesture that had survived from a time when he could have been afflicted with a headache by Anakin’s impulsive actions. A time long ago when he had been crude matter instead of luminous spirit. “I advise that you don’t rush into it. That you take some to reflect and meditate before doing anything rash that you can’t undo.”

Anakin didn’t have time for caution when Sidious was alive and contemplating future acts of mass evil against the galaxy. When he had so many of his own crimes to atone for--so many wrongs he had to try to make right, a balancing of the cosmic Force that he had to achieve before he could be satisfied that he had truly brought balance to the Force as the prophecy had proclaimed he must.

“There’s no time.” Anakin shot his best friend and teacher a look filled with as much sorrow as impatience. “I have to try to be reborn now. It’s my duty to the galaxy. The only chance I have to find redemption and earn forgiveness for the crimes I committed in my last life, my first life. The only way I can destroy the Sith and restore balance to the Force.”


	2. Reincarnate (Or the Conception of Ben Solo)

And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird.” --Peter Matthiessen, Snow Leopard

Reincarnate (Or the Conception of Ben Solo)

Anakin departed from Obi-Wan and sank into the deepest form of mediation that was only attainable by those who had transcended physical realities or limitations as they should truly have been called and achieved absolute union with the Force.

He was one with the Force, he told himself. All his desires stemmed from the Force and were rooted in the Force. Now that he was grafted completely into the Force, he could not want anything wrong or profane. Anything he wished for with all his soul must be pure then.

The Force had created him once, conceiving him without a father through the midichlorians that had whispered the will of the Force to him since before he had even been taught by the Jedi what the Force was and how it worked to order and sustain all life in the universe.

It could create him again if he asked it humbly. It would have to create him again if he were to fulfill the prophecy that he would be the one to bring balance to the Force and accomplish what he had been born to achieve.

Being reborn hurts, the Force spoke to him, echoing in his ears and his cells. That’s why few are allowed to feel it or remember it.

Are many reborn and don’t know it? Anakin was astonished and baffled, drowning in an ocean of confusion.

All are reborn, and few know it, the Force answered with a sound and feeling like birds flying and singing free in a forest. For most, they die and become dust, dirt, or ash. From the dust, dirt, or ash that was them, new life--sentient, animal, or plant--may be forged, but the new life does not remember the old life that birthed it. The remembering is an unfading agony.

Why? Anakin’s spirit felt dry as a Tatooine desert.

Because, if permitted to remember its past life, the soul will remember all the pain it ever experienced. The Force sounded like a breeze sighing through jungle leaves. All the wounds inflicted by that soul on others or by that soul on others, wounds that may never heal despite the spirit’s chance to live again. All the wrongs committed against that spirit by others or toward others by that spirit that may never be made right. A crushing weight of guilt, sorrow, and memory. A dreadful burden few would wish to carry or could carry. Forgetting is the mercy; remembering the torment.

I need to remember. Anakin could feel his resolve hardening like durasteel inside him. If I don’t remember my past and who I was when I am reborn, I will not be able to bring balance to the Force and finally defeat Sidious. To achieve my ultimate purpose for existing, I must remember.

Remembering will be more difficult and painful than you can possibly imagine. The Force was warning, not forbidding, and Anakin felt a surge of hope along with the inevitable sense of foreboding that came with being cautioned by the power that bound all life in the universe together in a single, vibrant thread that could not be severed no matter how much the Dark Side sought to cut it.

I can bear all things if you strengthen me. Anakin was determined that this time he wouldn’t fail to bring balance to the Force and vanquish Sidious for eternity. That this time he would not turn his back on all that was good and light in the galaxy in selfish pursuit of all that was vile and dark. That this time he would right the wrongs that he had committed in a past life, the cruelties and the injustices that hung heavy on his soul. That this time he would heal the wounds of the past by fighting for less present and future suffering in the universe.

Never claim that I didn’t warn you. The Force sounded wry if that were possible, and Anakin supposed it was possible, and the omnipotent Force could do whatever it desired.

Then Anakin felt a hurricane ripping through him. He felt himself breaking but still retaining an inexplicable awareness of himself even as he seemed to exist apart from and outside of himself. It was like dying a second time. Only more painful. The Force’s warning had somehow failed to convey that rebirth could be more painful than death. That anything could be more painful than death.

After what could have been a moment or an eon in this timeless state of agony, he felt himself being reformed and re-forged into the smallest vessel of human life: a single cell conceived in love.

He was in a warm, wet womb, feeling the protective strength of a mother’s love surrounding him and shielding him from all harm. The womb of a mother who had been his daughter in a previous life because his spirit had subconsciously sought out its kin--it’s closest relation--as it attempted to be reborn in flesh and blood.

All should have been light inside him, and optimism at a fresh start, a chance to literally remake himself and succeed where he had failed in his past life. To bring balance to the Force and finally destroy Sidious.

And there was light inside him, but it was undermined and opposed by darkness and despair. Weighed down by guilt and remorse. Shackled by shame and memory. He remembered the wrongs he had committed in his past life, and they remained inside of him like a black stain he feared could never be wiped clean. The fear that had been his undoing in his past life lurked inside him like a shadow threatening to swallow him again before he even emerged from his mother’s womb. New starts were impossible even if new life was attainable through the ineffable power and majesty of the Force.


End file.
